Drag Show: A feminist interpretation

A few weeks ago I had occasion to go to a drag show for a bachelorette party of a dear friend. In addition to being raunchy and a lot of fun, watching men clothed as lounge singers get dollar bills shoved in their bras by a ravening horde of various bachelorette partiers made me wonder why the joint was filled with women and exactly what enjoyment we were getting out of the event.

The stereotypical bachelor party includes strippers. Bachelorette parties are a newer tradition (thank you women's lib), and it seems that a drag show is for women what a strip bar is for men. Except instead of seeing men strip, we watched transvestites strip, straddle bachelorettes, and get dollar bills put into their skirts, bras and mouths as they shimmied to Cher, the Supremes and Beyonce.

The dancers' dazzling appearances, with elaborate costumes and oodles of makeup made me feel like I was watching the constructed ideal of femininity gyrate on stage, femininity divorced from inborn biology, so constructed that it seemed like the ideal to which airbrushed magazine vixens aspire. Several of the transwomen were hotter than I could ever be, even if I went on an all ice water diet and hit the gym 8 hours a day.

As a feminist, I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of stripping, but I'm also uncomfortable passing judgment on women who choose to strip or are forced into stripping to get by.

Yet here we were, stalwart bachelorette partiers, rehashing the power dynamics of a strip club. Were we fetishizing a power dynamic that on its face, seemed sexist? Were our faces frozen in masks of delight because these women were doing the things we would not dare do ourselves, for fear of being labelled "slut"? Or were we enjoying being on the other side of a sex for money power dynamic that has traditionally penalized women?

In short, was this bawdy fun or a meta-feminist experience? I'm still not sure.

High heels, high expectations

A friend told me the other day that because her boyfriend is her same height, she doesn’t like to wear high heels so that she doesn’t look taller than he. I think this is a fairly common sentiment, but it got me thinking. If we’re restricting what we wear because of a man, what other areas of our lives are we inhibiting because of what people will think of us?

I noticed this happening just the other day, while hanging out with 3 of my male friends. I could feel inhibitions settling in, and though I scolded myself for allowing these guys, merely by their presence, to have so much control over what I said, I still found myself sitting quietly, laughing politely at things that weren’t particularly funny to me. I noticed that I was restraining myself from saying anything that wasn’t clever, witty, or otherwise profound, as if I were representing all of womankind.

This is not a healthy environment if a woman is to be free to be herself. If we keep acting like we’re expected to, nothing will change. Women will continue to sit quietly, laughing politely at misogynistic comments, choosing flats to make a man feel more masculine. It takes courage to act unexpectedly, to risk ridicule or judgment. It takes courage, but courage we’ve got.

So wear those high heels. Speak your mind. Don’t laugh if you don’t think it’s funny. Instead of portraying to the world the role of a predictable woman, why not dazzle them with your unexpected inner beauty? You might surprise yourself.

Girls, girls girls!

As Webmistress, I have been working hard to pull together Fringe's much-anticipated Ethnos issue (which will go live March 1). Though I had read each piece separately, it wasn't until I set the contributor page for the issue that I noticed we've got an all-female contributor list this time around.

When I made the realization, I was initially elated. Here I am, an editor at a magazine run by women, and I brag often about how many female authors we have featured over the past few years. I am proud that we have created a comfortable environment for work from all types of authors, be they female, male, transgender, non-white, non-traditional, or any other adjective you can muster.

But in spite of myself, I felt somehow self-conscious about having a male-free issue.

As I laid in bed last night with my now-usual pregnancy insomnia, I tried to reason with myself. The honest truth is that I felt that publishing all women would make men feel excluded. Why did this bother me? Afterall, women have often been excluded! But still, isn't our magazine trying to fight against the exclusion of anyone? So musn't we include the white male as well?

But then I intellectualized a bit. We did not set out to choose an all-female cast for this issue. Each genre editor chose the piece she thought worked best with the goal of the magazine and the goal of the theme issue. These contributors just happened to be women. Nothing to be self-conscious of there. And so I made myself feel better. And I realized that even I, a super feminist to the nth degree, cannot fully escape some ingrained patriarchal dictates. All I can do is reason with them, struggle with them, be conscious of them, and continue to fight against them.

And now you've heard my confession, so the circle is complete.

Yours,
Julia (Who hopes you'll still think she's a good feminist. Do you?)

Guyliner

Here it is ladies, evidence of a drastic advance in gender equality...guyliner.

Before you know it, we'll be making 100 cents on the dollar.

Right Hand Rings Pit Marriage Against Career

In the search for my own engagement ring and an ethical diamond, I came across a peculiar trend: the right hand ring. Ads and websites urge women to "celebrate your success" with a diamond ring worn on the right hand. (Now single women can join in the fun of owning a diamond and show their individuality and empowerment -- through blind commercialism! That supports slavery!)

Like Art Editor Julia, I loathe ad campaigns that encourage pamper-spending for women. And obviously, the promotions occasionally insult women's intelligence. This Generous Gems page actually tries to convince you that right hand rings are fitted differently from left-hand ones.

My personal annoyance aside, I think the most interesting part of this trend is the way that it equates marriage with a successful career. Right hand rings are supposed to showcase a woman's monetary success, while presumably left hand rings showcase her skill as a mantrap.

I find this distinctly unsettling. Marriage and engagement rings are part of the private sphere and of a tradition that extends back through time, while careers are part of the public sphere, and for women at least, a relatively new concept. By extension, the right hand ring suggests that career women are married to their careers, and as such unavailable/unable to engage in marriage. Reminds me of the horrifically-insulting-to-women-everywhere Forbes Article "Don't Marry Career Women."

Furthermore, I'm not sure we should celebrate when anyone becomes a workaholic, married to their jobs. Careers are not replacements for a rich private life, whether that life includes marriage or not. And yes, we should celebrate success, but why not do so with a plum 401(k) that sustains long after a person has lost the will to work?

Trend: Keeping the baby

Before Harry Potter took over as Ultimate Hit of Summer 2007, there was a very popular movie called Knocked Up, comedically chronicling two young people deciding to keep the baby. All of a sudden, these stories are everywhere: Glamour has hired a 26-year-old single mom-to-be to blog about her experience (and here's what Gawker burped up), and the NYT recently ran a poignant Modern Love about journalist Ronda Kasen's decision to keep her unplanned baby.

What's going on? First question, is there a subversive anti-choice message going on here? As the trend grows, it's almost inevitably going to swing that way, unfortunately. But for all the backlash about the film Knocked Up being anti-choice propaganda, I don't think that's the case. I think we can thank the ultraconservative, sex-fearing MPAA for abortion and sexual issues' absence in contemporary American film (and if you haven't seen Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated, you oughta).

I think this trend elicits something different -- the bittersweet idealism of launching a baby into a crumbling world. I'm 25, and of all my friends and cousins, know no one having a kid. It's too awful out here. Even despite these troubled times, we're just too poor, too busy, have too many plans. So when we see other compassionate, intelligent, flawed people in those months before the little human lands, it's hard not to get sucked in, and put pessimism aside for a moment to nod to the potential of new life.

Teeth, feathers, girls, boys

A good poem from Jeannine Hall Gailey on Verse Daily this morning:

The Husband Tries to Write to the Disappearing Wife.

On her blog, Jeannine says: "This is one of the few persona poems where I tried to write in a male voice, so it was a little risky for me."

I reckon it's good—potentially good for the poem, most def. good for the mind—to mess around with gender in this way. Seems like, now that the distinctions between genders are blurrier than ever, it should be easier for us to do. But having tried writing from the boys' side of things, I find it still does feel risky, or at least difficult. Brava!

Bound: A Feminist Reading?

I'm a big fan of all things noir, but even though my father lent me this movie close to three years ago, I'd put off seeing it. I can't really say why, other than the unappealing cover photo, and the billing that it was the movie the Wachowski Brothers made before The Matrix.

I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by the gritty noir plot of two million dollars, mobsters, wife beating, and lesbians. A surface reading of this movie might extoll the way the film twists classic noir conventions by empowering the femme fatal Violet(Jennifer Tilly) to take control of her situation and try to screw over her abusive husband. Gina Gershon plays Corky, a butch lesbian thrown into the explosive situation by chance, and in it for love and money.

A different reading might comment that the central couple (Corky and Violet), while nominally empowered and in control of their situation, simply re-hash gender dynamics the film makers seem so desperate to escape -- Gershon is butch while Tilly puts the femme in femme fatale, Gershon is masculine to Tilly's feminine. Rather than breaking binary notions of gender, the two simply take the ballgame to a different arena.

I'm no Julia Serano (reading Bitch's recent interview with her prompted these thoughts) -- perhaps Bound simply replicates heterosexual dynamics with lesbians, perhaps reading heterosexual politics into their relationship is heterosexist of me, but in the end, you gotta love a movie where two women take on the mob and give them a bloody run for their money.

My First Review Copy

About six weeks ago I returned home from a long day of thesis work to find Stacey Richter's Twin Study in my mailbox. It was my very first review copy, and its receipt made me feel like I am a real publisher, a feeling I don't have often due to the surreality of printing work on the web. You can look for a review of Twin Study in a future issue of Fringe.

I am only four stories into the collection, and savoring every quirky phrase. But one phrase gave me pause, and it wasn't Richter's. Time's blurb on the back reads:

"Richter brings a wacky imagination to the gender wars...one of the more outlandishly imaginative minds in contemporary fiction."

Gender wars? It seems to me that Richter is capturing a certain reality of the world women live in, and I think that "gender wars" belittles her theme. It reminds me of one of the Guerilla Girls' action posters, Advantages of Being a Woman Artist, "Being reassured that whatever art you make it will be labeled feminine." But perhaps I'm being unfair. I'm sure Time has commended Cormac McCarthy and John Updike for contributing to the gender wars as well.

So far this is an excellent book, and those who haven't checked out Richter's website, where she hilariously fields questions from the peanuts, are missing out.